Jared Recommends:

Usagi Yojimbo
Usagi, a masterless samurai, wanders 17th century Japan having adventures, and slowly meeting a huge cast of supporting characters. Of course, all the characters are humanized animals – Usagi is a humanoid rabbit, and his pal/rival Gen is a rhino. Usagi has been coming out for 25 years, so creator Stan Sakai has had a long time to build a world and a group of characters that interact well, while also having some dynamic adventures with intrigue, swordplay, romance, drama and ninja!

Tintin
Herge’s Tintin may be the world’s most popular comic book series, but it is little known in America. Young reporter Tintin travels the world with his dog Snowy getting caught up in adventures, from searching for lost pirate treasure, finding Incan ruins, and a trip to the moon to a mysterious theft at home. Herge’s Tintin stories run the gamut, and are also known for his well-researched art and storylines. His art itself, the “clear line” style, was a major influence on the development of comic art. His characters are equally well-known, from the blustery, hard-drinking Captain Haddock to the absent-minded genuis Professor Calculus.

Cerebus
Dave Sim’s epic 300 issue self-published comic set all kinds of precedents. Including Sim going pretty crazy at the end of the run. But his early storylines evolve from a rather amusing send-up of Barry Windsor-Smith sword-and-sorcery Conan comics into a huge commentary on politics and religion when Cerebus gets elected Pope of the world. Add in Gerhard’s meticulous backgrounds and Sim’s excellent lettering and you have an amazing book. Plus lots of amazing characters, like the Groucho Marx inspired one.

Amazing Spider-Man by Ditko and Lee
Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s creation of Spider-Man not only turned the superhero industry on its head with a relatable teenage hero with real problems, they also built a huge amount of compelling villains and good friends, rivals, and annoyances for Peter Parker to deal with. Under the superhero action framework, they told one of comics best soap operas. With his affections split between numerous women, would Peter ever be able to devote himself to any girl when he secretly leads a dangerous and demanding life? Plus Ditko’s art is pretty amazing!

Kane
Paul Grist tells a hard-boiled police series. Detective Kane is back on the force after a suspension for shooting his corrupt but immensely popular partner. Now all the other cops hate him, while local crime boss Oscar Darke still runs the city of New Eden. Plus Kane has to deal with his new partner, Kate, while dealing with bomb threats, snipers, and a thug running around in a pink bunny suit. Grist slowly builds up the story and characters, dancing around why Kane shot his partner, his history with Darke, and uses evocative and innovative layouts to tell the story.

Joel Recommends:

Superman: Red Son
What if baby Kal-Els escape ship had landed in the Soviet Union rather than Smallville?

Planetary
An archeological history of the super-hero, with many vaguely familiar characters sprinkled about.

Brat Pack
What you read after Watchmen.

Topham Recommends:

Asterios Polyp
Asterios Polyp is a professor of architecture who has reached a point of spiritual crisis. When his apartment burns down, Polyp buys a bus ticket to a randomly chosen new town where he hopes to start a new life. Subsequent chapters alternate between the new life Polyp is building and flashbacks on the choices that brought him to his crisis. Creator David Mazzucchelli expresses some fairly complex ideas in purely visual form and he does it brilliantly. There is innovation in his use of every aspect of the medium, from rendering to color, from lettering to panel transitions. Yet it’s never done in a showy, self indulgent way. Every experiment serves the story and draws the reader further into a moving and insightful tale.

Blankets
Craig Thompson’s thoughtful memoir recreates the confusion, emotional pain, and isolation of the author’s rigidly fundamentalist Christian upbringing, along with the sturm und drang of coming to maturity. By high school, Thompson’s a directionless mess — until he meets Raina and her circle of social outcasts at a religious camp. Raina introduces Craig to her own less-than-perfect family, a new teen community, and a broader sense of himself and his future. They fall in love and the experience steers Thompson into the beginnings of adult life. The author handles complex, intense subject matter with sincerity, pictorial lyricism, and taste.

Bone
This series chronicles the adventures of three cousins who leave their home of Boneville and are swept up in a “Looney Tunes-meets-Lord of the Rings” epic of royalty, dragons, and unspeakable evil forces out to conquer humankind. The early chapters emphasize humor and characterization, so that the reader is fully invested when the more adventurous aspects of the tale come to the fore. Creator Jeff Smith’s accomplished drawing style is suffused with warmth and charm and is always in service to a superbly paced story.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Fun Home is a chronicle of Alison Bechdel’s childhood and coming-of-age as a woman and lesbian. The heart of the story is her troubled relationship with her emotionally remote father, who was an English teacher and ran a funeral parlor. Fun Home has two meanings here: the funeral parlor, where her dad prepared the corpses for burial and did the floral arrangements, and the family’s fastidiously refurbished gothic revival house, all done up in lace and ornaments. Chapters weave back and forth in time with no confusion in this richly layered graphic novel. Its power is subtle, but it will leave you with haunting visual and verbal images that you won’t soon forget.

Get a Life
Monsieur Jean is a minor Parisian author and jazz collector who’s about to turn 30. He can’t stand his landlady, but the rent on his apartment is too low to move elsewhere. All his friends are marrying and starting families, but while Jean has no trouble getting women, but he can’t seem to keep a relationship going. He finds himself playing daddy to other people’s children and remembering the time when the life of an artist and pop culture addict seemed a lot easier. The creators portray Jean’s not-quite-midlife crises with playful humor and outrageous fantasy.

It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken
Repelled by the vulgarity of contemporary culture, writer/artist Seth takes refuge in a quest to uncover the life and work of a forgotten New Yorker cartoonist from the 1940s. His fixation blinds him to his increasingly detached lover and the quiet desperation of his family. Seth pays homage to the elegance of old magazine cartoons while working in their style. This charming alchemy synthesizes longing, anxiety, philosophy and wistful time travel.

Pyongyang: A Journey Into North Korea
Many American, Canadian and European animation studios farm the grunt work out to Asia, where the labor is cheaper. Those companies still want their own employees to preside over that work. This is the story of a Canadian animator who spent two years in North Korea supervising an animation unit. He provides rare insight into a country which severely restricts journalists, photographers, or any other sort of reportage. With bleak humor and sharp observations, the reader is given a glimpse into a society that has long been shrouded in secrecy.